TERRY RICHARD/THE OREGONIANAn "albertasaurus" is one of many dinosaurs at Royal Tyrrell Museum at Drumheller, Alberta. Since it dates to a different time than the similar-looking tyrannosaurus rex, it takes a local name.

The Alberta prairie lets your imagination take you back nearly 6,000 years, to an era when Stone Age humans coaxed herds of buffalo to plunge off cliffs to their deaths.

Or even farther back, 185 million years, to when dinosaurs ruled the world.

Both epochs have iconic visitor centers less than a two-hour drive from Calgary.

Head Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is a world heritage site near Fort McLeod, while Royal Tyrrell Museum near Drumheller is one of the world's great centers for the study, preservation and display of fossils.

In many ways Calgary, the city that provides many visitors to both, is much like Portland. Both are great cities to live in, though both have issues with winter weather.

Both, too, have plenty of in-town attractions for tourists.

But within a day or two, visitors are itching to get out of either city, to see the mountains and prairie of Alberta, or the ocean and gorge of Oregon.

During my recent Calgary visit, the nearby Rocky Mountains were just beginning to shed their deep coat of winter white, so I opted for a two-day driving tour of the prairie.

I headed first for Head-Smashed-In, in the Porcupine Hills southwest of Calgary, within view of the Rockies and facing a prairie that stretches east a thousand miles.

The site takes its name from a curious Blackfoot brave, who hid in the rocks at the base of the cliff to watch the bison plunge to their deaths. The hunt that day was so successful that bodies of buffalo piled high enough to crush his skull.

The hunts could be staged only in years when buffalo grazed the area, but it was used for eons. Archeological studies have verified use of the site for 5,700 years, until European settlers nearly exterminated the buffalo in the 1870s.

After driving north two hours, I arrived at Drumheller, a town of 8,000 that lives and breathes dinosaurs. The town visitor center proudly displays the largest dinosaur statue on Earth, an 86-foot-tall T. rex that visitors can climb into and pop out at the mouth for a good look around.

The Royal Tyrrell Museum overflows with dinosaur replicas and fossilized bones, many unearthed nearby in Alberta's badlands. But it was a curious creature from nearby British Columbia that held my attention.

One of the museum's scientists, Betsy Nicholls, spent the last seven years of her life, before she died of cancer, uncovering and preparing for display a 70-foot-long ichthyosaur. This filter-feeding marine reptile, predating the dinosaurs at 220 million years, had no teeth in its nine-foot-long skull.

The rendering of the reptile looks like depictions of the Loch Ness monster of Scotland and locally renowned Ogopogo of Okanagan Lake in British Columbia.